Good morning, RVA! It's 42 °F, and it’s chilly again! Today you can expect things to warm up, though, to just about 70 °F by late afternoon. We’ve got a similar deal on deck for tomorrow, and then warmer weather starts to return (with some rain) towards the end of the week. Enjoy the next couple of dry days!
Water cooler
Early Friday morning, a crash involving multiple drivers spilled onto the sidewalk of the 700 block of E. Broad Street killing a pedestrian. This is right outside the National, a busy section of sidewalk most times of day, and, had it been an hour or two later, would have taken place right as hundreds of folks are walking to work. I’m tired of writing it, but the City’s public works staff should investigate every crash that causes serious injuries or deaths and deploy cheap, effective, and temporary measures to keep it from happening again.
City Council meets tonight, and, I think, will hold the final public hearing on the FY23 budget. Unfortunately, I’ve lost the thread a bit as the season comes to a close—especially about how Council plans on funding Richmond Public Schools given the School Board’s delays and disorganization in submitting their own budget. Tonight, however, Council will consider an amendment to the school-related budget papers that will allocate $15 million to a reserve fund that can only be unlocked with a future budget amendment. This is City Council oversight in action! Council staff recommended this course of action given the lack of timely budget information from RPS, and it’s a technique that the City has used to deal with school budget shenanigans in the past. I like the oversight, but dislike that it’s necessary, and am nervous about the School Board successfully navigating the process to unlock those funds.
Also on the Council beat, they’ve continued most of their agenda to a later date (including the two collective bargaining papers), but will consider ORD. 2022-124, which closes 1.4 square feet of the public right-of-way—the tiniest amount!—on W. Marshall Street. The related staff report is a fun read and says the design for an adjacent parking deck changed at some point and pushed two supporting columns out a smidge into the sidewalk. The engineering diagram on page eight of this PDF made me chuckle. Now the developer’s lender has required this ordinance...Or Else. The developer will pay the City $67.66 for this encroachment.
Michael Martz at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has more on the Governor’s decision to revoke every state employee’s telework agreement—on the last day of Public Service Recognition Week no less. A director of one agency, who chose to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, is concerned about state jobs now being less competitive compared to private sector jobs—especially for Gen Z and Millennial workers. It’s good to see Sen. McClellan, as always, standing up for folks, calling the new policy “ill-conceived and out of step with industry trends.”
Hey hey, City crews are, at this moment, paving the fifth and final section of Broad street—from Hamilton Street to Staples Mill Road. As always, you can find the impacts to GRTC’s bus routes over on their website, and remember to plan ahead if you absolutely need a CookOut milkshake over the next couple of days. Red paint for the center-running bus-only lanes could start to show up as soon as next month!
Via /r/rva, this really fascinating needlework commemorating the 1811 Richmond Theatre fire. Dozens of people died, including the newly appointed governor, and the paper published a creepy poem following the tragedy arguing for a change in land use.
The Science Museum of Virginia has a ton of open slots for their upcoming RVAir meetups and community walks, that you should strongly consider signing up for. Take some time to walk around your favorite Richmond neighborhood measuring air quality FOR SCIENCE. Afterwards you get to call yourself a citizen scientist, which is reason enough to sign up, if you ask me.
This morning's longread
Mechanical Watch
This interactive...article? I don’t even know what to call it...walks you step-by-step through how a mechanical watch works. Fascinating! This is literally how I spent my Friday night, because I am a very exciting person.
In the world of modern portable devices, it may be hard to believe that merely a few decades ago the most convenient way to keep track of time was a mechanical watch. Unlike their quartz and smart siblings, mechanical watches can run without using any batteries or other electronic components. Over the course of this article I’ll explain the workings of the mechanism seen in the demonstration below. You can drag the device around to change your viewing angle, and you can use the slider to peek at what’s going on inside.
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